PrintFaculty in Montana win benefits for
same-sex partners
The AFT in Montana helped secure an important victory for equity for gay and lesbian partners when the state Supreme Court ruled in January that the university system must provide health insurance for the same-sex partners of its employees.
The ruling is the first legal requirement set by a state regarding health benefits for same-sex partners. In a 4-3 decision, the court reasoned that since benefits were available to unmarried heterosexual partners who could prove common-law marriage, to deny the same benefits to same-sex partners would be a violation of the equal protection clause in the state’s constitution.
The triumph was especially sweet for those who crusaded to win this right. “I just wanted to make a difference so other families could get benefits,” says Carol Snetsinger, who worked in the biology department at the University of Montana. She has since left the university. “The end result had a much bigger effect than I thought.”
The case sets an important precedent that equal protection includes homosexuals, adds Snetsinger, who was one of four individuals to sue the university system for benefits. The suit was filed in February 2002, but dismissed from district court; the appeal came to the Supreme Court in March 2003. Other plaintiffs in the case were Snetsinger’s partner, Nancy Siegel; Carla Grayson, a psychology professor and University Faculty Association/MEA-MFT/AFT member; her partner, Adrianne Neff; and Montana PRIDE. They were represented by an attorney from the American Civil Liberties Union. The AFT’s state affiliate, MEA-MFT, filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the plaintiffs.
When Snetsinger took a job at the University of Montana, where she worked in curriculum development and Web design for the biology department, she applied for health insurance for her partner, Nancy Siegel. However, she was told it was not available to her. She contacted an organization for gay staff and faculty, the Lambda Alliance, which was already working on the issue.
“It was completely unjust that my colleagues got these benefits that I felt I was entitled to, especially in light [of the fact] that they were giving unmarried partners benefits,” says Snetsinger.
When the Lambda Alliance approached the UFA, “we moved right away to identify this as a membership issue,” says Mike Kupilik, president of UFA. Although Snetsinger was a part-time employee and not a member, her cause was relevant to other employees. “We got the [MEA-MFT] board of directors to vote on it as an issue and they weighed in as a friend of the court [supporting the plaintiffs] in the suit. They lent their name at our urging.”
Shortly after the suit was filed, arsonists destroyed the home of Grayson and Neff. They escaped, with their infant son, through a window. They have since moved out of the state.
“We were pretty terrified for a while,” recalls Snetsinger, who received death threats and a letter claiming to be laced with anthrax (it wasn’t). But the community rallied behind her; the police and the gay community hammered out a supportive relationship that continues today, and the county government adopted a policy allowing same-sex domestic partnership benefits as well.
For their persistence and bravery, the four complainants received the Walt Brown Award from the Montana Human Rights Network on Feb. 6, 2003, the first anniversary of the house burning.
“Given the attitudes of the state,” says Kupilik, reflecting on the November 2004 referendum in Montana to prohibit gay marriage, “this is a remarkable decision based on equity.”
Higher Education PPC to tackle personnel crisis
AFT’s higher education leaders are resisting the continued determination of colleges and universities to provide education on the cheap, despite the obvious result of reduced quality and service to students. Nowhere is this shortsighted approach more problematic than in staffing. Institutions increasingly rely upon a contingent workforce of professors who are inadequately supported in every way—in pay and health benefits, and in resources for the classroom and student advising.
The AFT calls this burst in the use of adjunct/part-time faculty an academic staffing crisis. It shows no sign of abating as U.S. Department of Education data reveal close to half of four-year university courses and well over half the classes offered at community colleges are taught by temporary faculty. The steady deterioration has occurred as the cost to families for higher education has soared.
In the next year, the AFT Higher Education program and policy council (PPC) will prepare a national action plan to document the staffing crisis and a strategy for restoring full-time tenure lines and bringing fairness and equity to contingent faculty. The plan, fleshed out at the Jan. 28-30 meeting of the council in Washington, D.C., includes publications, legislative and bargaining models and a national campaign to mobilize members, students and the public.
Linked to the staffing crisis is the overall trend of states cutting back on higher ed funding. As money runs scarce, colleges and universities are being whipped by those bent on diminishing and politicizing those institutions’ missions. The PPC spent a half-day of its meeting working with political consultant Darry Sragow discussing ways to strengthen higher education’s image and counter those forces working to starve what is viewed by most of society as a public good.
At the meeting, the group also appointed five members to a task force it set up jointly with the AFT Healthcare PPC to address the serious shortage of faculty (as well as students) in schools of nursing. It heard from AFT’s healthcare benefits expert John Abraham on developments in bargaining, and it broke into subcommittees to develop action and strategic plans in the areas of organizing, student success and accountability, and government relations.
The governing body also welcomed six new members: Perry Buckley, president of the Cook County College Teachers Union in Chicago; Chris Goff of the Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation of the University of Oregon; Larry Oveson, president of the Minnesota State College Faculty; Sam Russo, president of the Adjunct Faculty United of Fullerton, Calif.; Ellen Schuler-Mauk, president of the Faculty Association at Suffolk (N.Y.) Community College; and Curtis Smeby, president of the Northern Montana College Federation of Teachers.
An attack on bargaining rights
Governors treat dedicated state workers like second-class citizens
The newly elected governors of Indiana and Missouri had barely been sworn into office when they launched a frontal attack on their workers. In early January, the governors, both Republican, took away the collective bargaining rights of their state employees, effectively negating or threatening the contracts of thousands.
“The direction these two governors have taken is misguided and unfortunate,” says Jim McGarvey, an AFT vice president from Montana and chair of the AFT Public Employees program and policy council. “Public employee collective bargaining has demonstrated its value across the country and has shown that real improvement in the delivery of public services comes with employees having meaningful input into the decisions that affect their work. Through collective bargaining and effective representation, we can improve services and improve the work lives of public employees.”
Indiana state employees gained collective bargaining rights in 1989 through an executive order signed by Gov. Evan Bayh. Every governor since then has honored that order, which permits state employees to negotiate pay, benefits and work rules. Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels’ decision to rescind those rights affects some 23,000 workers, including 14,000 men and women represented by the Unity Team, a joint local of the AFT and the United Auto Workers.
“Our work continues, and together we can improve the lives of Indiana state employees and their families,” wrote Unity Team president Fuzz LeMay, a member of the AFT Public Employees program and policy council. “More than ever, state employees need a voice in the decisions that affect their work. Through our work together, we can continue to provide that voice at the work site, in the halls of the Legislature and in the governor’s office.”
Daniels also issued executive orders invalidating labor agreements scheduled to run through June 2007, reports the Indianapolis Star.
“This is a dark day for the people of Indiana,” says AFT president Edward J. McElroy. “Collective bargaining is a process that benefits taxpayers as much as it does state employees. It brings with it higher quality services, more efficient government and improved quality of life for all of Indiana’s citizens. Gov. Daniels’ move is a leap in the wrong direction.”
Missouri’s new Republican Gov. Matt Blunt repealed the 2001 executive order of his predecessor—Democratic Gov. Bob Holden—giving some state employees the right to union representation for contract negotiations.
About 9,000 Missouri state employees are represented by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the Service Employees International Union. While the unions can still represent employees, there is no guaranteed collective bargaining process to allow them to reach a binding contract, reports the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Holden’s order also had permitted unions to collect fair share fees from workers they represented.
“The governors’ actions deny Indiana and Missouri state employees the rights enjoyed by all private sector workers and by state employees in other states,” says AFL-CIO president John Sweeney. “And they echo a message coming from the White House down to men and women on the frontlines of our struggles against poverty, disease, crime and terrorism all across the country: We expect first-class devotion, service and sacrifice, but we will treat you like second-class citizens.”
The AFL-CIO and its affiliates “will do everything within our power to help restore the rights of Indiana and Missouri state employees,” Sweeney has vowed.
Minn. governor seeks higher ed vouchers
Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty plans to take his state higher education system down the same voucher path as Colorado. During his State of the State speech on Jan. 18, Gov. Pawlenty said that he would like to form a program similar to Colorado’s College Opportunity Fund, which gives higher education money directly to students and their families rather than to institutions.
“Under this approach, colleges will need to be more accountable to their customers, more responsive to the marketplace, and more accountable for results to succeed,” he stated.
The College Opportunity Fund will begin operating in Colorado this July. Two-thirds of the state’s higher education money will be given directly to Colorado residents who enroll in undergraduate programs at public or eligible private institutions. Students attending public institutions will receive the full stipend of approximately $2,400 for the first year. Those enrolling in private institutions will have to demonstrate a need for the funds. If they do, they will receive half of the amount given to students enrolled in public institutions.
Larry Gold, AFT Higher Education director, says the plan provides a foothold on the slippery slope of privatizing higher education, and thus could be very harmful. Using vouchers will make higher education more akin to a business than an institution supported by the public. Schools will lose their focus on education and become more concerned with marketing. Furthermore, as Minnesota state college representative Brad Krasaway told Minnesota Public Radio, when colleges lose much-needed state funding, they often turn to tuition increases to fill the funding gaps. If they can’t fill these gaps, the strong state research programs are likely to suffer, along with less popular, but still vitally important, programs.
University of Minnesota President Robert Bruininks has been an outspoken opponent of vouchers. According to the Duluth News Tribune, he told lawmakers that vouchers are a “recipe to erode the strength and capacity of the university to support its educational and research programs.”
That is not good news for a state that already lacks funding for higher education. In the past four years, tuition rates have increased to make up for declining state aid. In 2004, only 9.1 percent of the state budget was dedicated to higher education, a significant drop from the more than 15 percent set aside in 1987.
Plans are still in an early stage, though, and as Minnesota State College Faculty president Larry Oveson says, “It’s all about politics. Right now we are just keeping an eye on where the plan is headed.” The MSCF is jointly affiliated with the AFT/NEA. According to news reports, the governor has asked the Minnesota Higher Education Services Office to begin creating a plan for presentation during the 2006 legislative session.
—Julie Berry
Professors emeriti were escorted out of their classrooms after the City Colleges of Chicago fired them for supporting their full-time colleagues during a strike over health benefits and salary late last year. Some 165 professors were fired in the January aftermath of the two-and-a-half-week strike, including part-time professors and the emeriti, retired professors who regularly return to campus to teach.
To protest the action, the Cook County College Teachers Union/AFT has filed for an arbitration. Also at each of the seven campuses of the college system, the faculty councils cast votes of no confidence in the CCC chancellor, Wayne Watson. They shared the results of those votes at a meeting of the City Colleges board of trustees Feb. 3, where union members and students packed the room and spoke out against the firings.
“Now that the strike is ended and we have returned to our students,” wrote Perry Buckley, president of CCCTU, in a recent newsletter, “the battle has entered a sad but undeniable stage: reprisals.” Buckley, who teaches English, calls the firings “mean and vindictive” as well as a violation of the CCCTU contract, pointing out a clause that prohibits reprisals against the union, union members, students and clerks, and any other person. The administration insists that, because adjuncts have a separate contract with a no-strike provision, the CCCTU contract is irrelevant. Professors emeriti, they say, are not covered by the contract, either. The colleges filed an unfair labor practice against CCCTU for filing for the arbitration.
Continuing acrimony has been disruptive, to say the least. On Jan. 31, the first day of classes—already delayed by three weeks because of contract negotiations—at least 25 classes had no instructor, says Buckley. At Olive-Harvey College, the library is opening two hours late because the professors in charge have been fired, and the African-American literature program has been slashed since three out of four of its faculty are gone. A cadaver course and another in gerontology will be canceled at Wilbur Wright for similar reasons.
Students are furious about the firings. “They were good people and good teachers,” says Jeremy Marks, who is studying law at Wright College. “You don’t get rid of good teachers, not when you need them so badly.”
W.V. poised to ‘meet and confer’
West Virginia is considering whether to allow its 43,860 public employees the right to meet and confer with management about working terms and conditions. Included in that group are almost 13,000 higher education faculty, professionals and classified staff.
On Dec. 30, 2004, as one of his last acts as governor, Democrat Bob Wise signed an executive order establishing the Governor’s Commission on Public Sector Employment and Employee Relations. In doing so, he was dealing a hand to his successor, Joe Manchin, also a Democrat and a labor supporter. By Feb. 1, Manchin had appointed the commission of 12, including six labor representatives. They are charged with making recommendations by Nov. 1.
Judy Hale, president of AFT-West Virginia, is labor’s education representative on the commission. AFT-West Virginia represents almost 6,000 county employees, mostly in the K-12 sector. “It’s our hope at the end of the day that our higher education employees will be able to sit down with their employers and, on an equal basis, talk about working conditions with dignity and respect,” says Hale.
West Virginia has 22 colleges and universities and the AFT already represents “a smattering of higher ed people across the state,” says Bob Morgenstern, who has just signed on to head up the union’s large higher ed organizing drive.
“Faculty are concerned about budget cuts in the state and two years of no raises,” says Morgenstern. “Commensurate with the cuts are tuition increases that have been averaging in the double digits.” Because of the low income of many state workers, the only hope for the economy “is to retool,” he adds.
Joe Wyatt, president of an AFT local at Marshall University, complains that faculty don’t have the clout they deserve in the state Legislature. For example, 20 years ago, lawmakers gave all state employees an “annual experience increment” of $50 for each year they worked, but higher education faculty were expressly excluded from the bonus. Rectifying that has been a cause of the Marshall faculty union, and this year, it convinced the statewide Advisory Council of Faculty to make it a top priority in presentations before the Legislature.
“At this time, faculty feel very frustrated,” says Sylvia Shurbutt, chair of the Advisory Council of Faculty and an English professor at Shepherd College.
“This is a chance to bring higher education employees into the labor movement and to give them a collective voice at the campus, state and national levels,” says Hale.
Council approves organizing plan of action
The AFT has laid out a path for the union’s organizing program that will include greater outreach to new constituencies, a national organizing model, more training for organizers and greater use of volunteer organizers in campaigns. In a series of recommendations approved by the AFT executive council at its winter meeting in Florida, the union’s organizing committee outlined a plan of action that builds on the union’s substantial experience in achieving continued growth.
In “Strengthening AFT’s Culture of Organizing,” the committee, chaired by AFT secretary-treasurer Nat LaCour, outlined a 10-point plan that refines and expands the union’s organizing agenda and outlines several new initiatives. One is the development of an AFT organizing model that would serve as a standard for organizing across the union. This model would draw on the experience of AFT and affiliate organizing staff to incorporate the union’s “best practices” in organizing campaigns. Also part of this initiative will be “comprehensive and progressive organizer training programs” based on the model.
The union also plans to establish a corps of voluntary organizers from within the ranks of AFT members who can communicate with prospective members and assist in organizing campaigns throughout the country. The AFT has successfully used volunteer organizers from established AFT locals to help with membership recruitment and other campaigns in the South in recent years, and the committee is recommending that the union make it a more formal program.
Other highlights of the organizing report include:
- Building affiliate capacity. The AFT will work with affiliates to connect the importance of new and internal organizing to success in bargaining, political and legislative effectiveness, and more.
- Outreach to new and nontraditional constituencies. This would include charter school teachers and school personnel, part-time and adjunct higher education faculty, graduate student employees, early childhood educators, substitute teachers and members of professional associations.
- Maximizing innovations in technology. This means developing effective database and record-keeping programs, communications networks and other technology to assist the union’s organizing agenda.
- Effective communications. AFT organizer training must include an emphasis on one-on-one communications (e.g., home visits, work-site visits, community outreach contacts), as well as templates, fliers and ready-made content for use by affiliates in organizing campaigns or communications efforts.
A monthly Internet-based meeting is giving AFT state federation presidents one more way to communicate directly with the national union and AFT president Edward J. McElroy.
Launched in November, the webcast combines audio teleconferencing with the ability to share documents and other data through the Web.
The webcast is a two-way communications system that increases state federation presidents’ access to the AFT leadership and to union resources. AFT secretary-treasurer Nat LaCour and executive vice president Antonia Cortese also participate in the webcast.
Materials are shared with participants through PowerPoint presentations and other software. There is also a tool that allows the host of the webcast to conduct online polls during the meeting.
Among the items on the agenda at the first meeting were recent changes in IDEA (the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act); an evaluation of the November state federation presidents’ conference in New Orleans; and preparation of “Joining Voices: Inclusive Strategies for Labor’s Renewal,” a working paper the AFT was requested to prepare by the AFL-CIO for its upcoming discussion on strengthening the labor movement.
The December meeting included an update on the neAft partnership and a debriefing on the union’s efforts in the 2004 presidential campaign. More than 25 state federation presidents and other state staff and leaders have participated in the first two webcasts. AFT regional directors were invited to participate in the December session.
The sessions end with an open forum where participants can raise other issues and concerns.
Faculty at the University of Montana-Western recently launched a program destined to put this remote school of 1,100 students on the map. In the first one-class-at-a-time system at a public university, Experience One—or X-1, as it’s known for short—is a program of classes scheduled one at a time for three hours a day, five days a week, over 18 days. It gives students uninterrupted focus and faculty an opportunity to delve more deeply into their material.
Playing to its strength, this faculty-driven initiative uses “small” as an asset, says Robert Thomas, a geology professor and president of Local 4323/MEA-MFT/AFT. “We took those smaller class sizes where you could get a dozen people into a van and take them out in the field,” scrapping the memorize-and-regurgitate method common in lecture halls.
X-1 drew a unanimously favorable vote from the faculty senate when it was proposed as a pilot for 2003-04, but some administrators were skeptical. Then the year ended with double the retention rate among participating freshmen, from 80 percent to 90 percent. In one professor’s class, average grades rose a full point, from 2.41 to almost 3.4. And UM-W had established a marketing niche. This year, the entire freshman class is attending X-1. By fall 2005, the whole school will have adopted the schedule.
Because X-1 is typically more experiential than lecture-based, John Hijduk was unsure it would work in his history course. Then he restructured his classes to include more student-initiated research and fewer lectures. “It was exciting to be doing something different,” he says. “It keeps things fresh.” Every student gets caught up in the material now, he says, and Hijduk is recharged by their enthusiasm.
Sheila Roberts, who applied for the $400,000 federal Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) grant that funded the X-1 pilot, says the continuity of daily class meetings is key to its success. She is putting students to work in the field with a local archeologist who needs to map geological terracing around a Native American site in order to better understand what period it represents. Other professors have used the lengthier class times for English students to visit the home of a local writer, and for geology students to monitor nitrates in ground water.
“I really think this is the biggest adventure going on in higher education right now,” says Roberts. “It’s been a lot of fun to be in it.”
